Maw Books

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Journey to Topaz by Yoshicku Uchida was recommended to me by Becky at Becky’s Book Reviews when I asked for an author with the last name beginning with U.  I knew right away that this was the book for me and I almost feel like I’m come full circle this year on the topic of the Japanese-Americans being interned during World War II.

On the same topic I recently read When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka (my book review) a book for adults that I really enjoyed, which was preceded by Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata (my book review) a book for Young Adults.  Now I’ve come to Journey to Topaz, a book for Middle Readers.  All are fictionalized accounts but the first two are based on the author’s own experience and all follow the journey of Japanese Americans living in California in the 1940’s.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor they are taken to the Tanforan Racetrack and literally live in horse stalls, and then they travel by train to Topaz, Utah where they are settle in a internment camp in the isolated desert.  I know there are a lot of books on this subject, but I have enjoyed these three that I have read this year.

To best summarize Journey to Topaz, I’d like to simply share with you the words of the author, Yoshicku Uchida, as written in the prologue (in 1984),

It has been many years since I first wrote Journey to Topaz and more than forty years since the United States government uprooted 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans, without trial or hearing, and imprisoned them behind barbed wire.  Two-thirds of those Japanese Americans were American Citizens, and I was one of them.  We were imprisoned by our own country during World War II, not because of anything we had done, but simply because we looked like the enemy . . .

Journey to Topaz is the story of what happened to one Japanese American Family during this wartime tragedy, then called “the evacuation.”  Although the characters are fictional, the events are based on actual fact, and most of what happened to the Sakane family also happened to my own.  I wold ask readers to remember that my characters portray the Japanese Americans of 1942 an to recall that the world then was totally different from the one we know today.  In 1942 the voice of Martin Luther King had not yet been heard and ethnic pride was yet unborn.  There was no awareness in the land of civil rights, and there had yet been no freedom marches or demonstrations of protest . . .

I hope by reading this book young people everywhere will realize what once took place in this country and will determine never to permit such a travesty of justice to occur again.

I really enjoyed Journey to Topaz and it would be an excellent resource in the classroom or otherwise to introduce to children what happened during the Japanese-American evacuation.  Yoshiko Uchida is a prolific author with more than 30 books and anthologies.  I’d like to read her memoir titled The Invisible Thread:  An Autobiography, as well as Picture Bride.  Yoskido Uchida does not have a website but I did find an author study site for a college course which has a lot of information.

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